About

Lima: the brain of your devices

$1,229,074

pledged of $69,000 goal

12,840

backers

We re-invented how your devices work

Today, most people have files everywhere. They have one content, but multiple devices. So they spend a lot of time just figuring out where are their documents. And they keep moving their files to-and-from tiny Cloud folders.

So we decided to solve this problem, from its root. We redesigned the way your devices store data, from the ground up. And we’ve built Lima.

With Lima, your devices work as a group. They all contain exactly the same files. Just like if they were one single, unique device.

Play with exactly the same content at all times, no matter which device you’re using.

Put thousands of movies on your iPad, even if you bought a small one.

Watch family pictures on your connected TV, without having to transfer them.

Share confidential folders with your colleagues without sending them to the Cloud companies.

Send documents instantaneously.

We think you’ll love it.

We made storage as simple as it can be

Lima is a small adapter that acts like the brain of your devices. It enables you to transform your old USB drives into a special memory, common to your smartphone, tablet and computers. Install Lima, and your devices will start storing all of their content in this common memory, at Home.

It’s fairly easy: just connect Lima to your Home Internet and connect a USB drive to Lima. Install the Lima app on all your devices, and you’re good to go.

Now your devices share the same brain

With Lima, your devices are a team. They do not keep any content for themselves anymore. All your documents, music, pictures and videos are stored in the same place.

So your iPhone contains exactly the same things as your laptop, even if it doesn’t have the same size. Your devices are just like frames, through which you can see exactly the same content, at all times.

Your content is unique again.

They all have the same size

Now, whenever you're connected to Internet, it's just like all your devices had exactly the same size: the size of your Lima. The initial size of your devices doesn't matter anymore.

Even if you have the tiniest of smartphones, you can put all your content in your pocket. And even if you bought the smallest of iPads, you'll have all your movies on it.

If something doesn’t fit in one device, it is streamed over the Internet, directly from your Lima. And if you decide to travel one-month in Internet-free Amazonia, you can select which files you'd like to view when you're offline. Just like you do with your music on Spotify.

Need more storage? You don't need to split your pictures and your documents between multiple hard drives anymore. Just add a drive to Lima, and it will instantly make all your devices bigger.

With a simple USB hub, you can connect up to eight drives per Lima. Because Lima stores your content in regular USB drives, you don’t need to buy fancy hardware from us just to get more space. And you can own your storage, not rent it.

That makes Lima environment friendly, but also much more affordable to use. Even if you don’t have a drive to connect to Lima, a brand new one will cost you about 20x less than storage in the Cloud. And you won't pay for it every year. That’s why you can clearly put all of your content on Lima, and not only a small part of it.

Sending all your holiday pictures takes only a second

Ever needed to send hundreds of pictures to a friend? With Lima, we invented a technology to transfer files instantly. No matter their size, no matter their number. That’s also part of our job to simplify storage.

Every version of your work is backed up

Lima makes it incredibly easy to back up your belongings. Every time you change something on your devices, Lima saves a version of it at Home. So if you mess up this very important document, you can roll back to an old version of it in only two clicks.

By buying several Limas, you can backup your data transparently in multiple locations. Lima is also 100% compatible with backup services such as BackBlaze or CrashPlan, which enable you to backup terabytes of data for less than $5/month.

Your storage is fast and private – again

When we designed Lima, privacy was one of our main concerns.

Lima stores your files at Home. So you can be sure you own your storage. Nobody in the world can access your data, but you. And you don’t need to pay monthly fees for that. The storage technology inside Lima was designed so you can get your data back anytime, even if your Lima device is broken.

The security of your Lima device is our first priority. Like a private datacenter, your Lima is far more difficult to hack than your computer. Our team works continuously with security experts to make sure it remains so. Like high security servers, your Lima will be frequently updated with security patches to keep it unaccessible from badly intentioned governments and individuals.

Because your data is closer to you, Lima is also up to 60x faster than your traditional Cloud services, whenever you’re at Home.

Your connected TV and Hi-Fi players can enter the game

If you have a connected TV or a set-top box, it will now have the same contents than your other devices. You can tell Lima which media you want to make available there. So at last you can watch all of your movies and pictures directly from your sofa. You can also play all of your music on your Wi-Fi enabled Hi-Fi player (using UPnP or DLNA).

And it goes further

Okay. So what's the difference with DropBox?

This is quite different.

Dropbox, in many ways, can be considered as a virtual USB key : it's like a small pen drive you copy your files into to move or edit them on other devices. At the difference that DropBox works with Internet, so you never have to carry your USB key around – which is quite handy. On the downside Dropbox is more expensive than a USB key, slower, and not your property because you have to rent it every month.

Like a USB key, DropBox is yet-another-memory. You need to manually copy your files into it, and it has a limit of size.

Lima is not yet-another-memory. It's a way to make all your devices store their content at the same place. While DropBox tries to be a better version of our USB keys, Lima tries to correct the problem that forced us to use USB Keys in the first place.

We replace the memories of your devices by Lima, so all your devices can have exactly the same contents at all times.

There's no dedicated folder where you have to move your files into. All your files are on Lima, from the files on your Desktop to the files in your Movies folder. So you don't need to copy and move your files around anymore : just let them where they always have been, they're already on your other devices.

Another big difference is that if you rent 1TB of DropBox storage, DropBox will take 1TB of storage on your devices so you can use it. When you add 1TB of storage to your Lima, your devices get 1TB bigger. Not the same product, not the same advantages.

Note: other Cloud services, such as Microsoft SkyDrive, Google Drive, Apple iCloud or SugarSync work similarly as DropBox

And about remote backup ?

Lima already backs up your files at Home. But if you want to backup your files in multiple locations, it's also possible and as easy at it can get.

If you care about your privacy, you can easily replicate your content over several Limas. You can install one Lima in your home and one in your office, for example. Your Limas will automatically work together to replicate your content. Two Limas are enough. But with each Lima you buy, your data gets more secure and also faster to access. If some of your friends have Lima, you can also ask your Limas to back up each other's content. Your data is encrypted, so your friends will not be able to read it.

If you accept to send your data over the web to other companies (like you do when using DropBox), you can also use services such as BackBlaze or CrashPlan to backup the entire content of your Lima in remote and secure datacenters. It costs less than $5/month to backup your data using these services. That's half the price of the cheapest DropBox plan.

To sum up

It's cheaper: Lima is not a service. You pay once, it's yours.

It's larger: Lima is designed to store your entire digital life.

It's faster: if you're at Home, transfer speed is 60x faster.

It's safer: you can backup all of your content, not only part of it. Privately for free. Remotely for less than $5/month.

It's yours: it's your own storage. Not a company's, not a government's.

We need your help!

Lima is an adventure, and you have more than your place in it.

We started it with the dream to make hard drives as easy to use as they should have been for the past 20 years. After 2 years of development, from hardware to software to web apps, we are nearly ready to launch a product we really think you’ll love.

But we have a tremendous need for feedback.
We also miss capital to produce a first batch of devices on our own.

And that’s why we need your help.

By being one of the first to get a Lima, you can really help us make this project a reality. Every person backing us makes the difference. We’ll make perfectly sure you get that love back.

What can I do with my Lima?

Go running and listen to your entire music library on your iPhone

Access to all of your content from abroad, even if you have only a small computer

Get all of your family’s pictures already on your computer after a holiday trip

Send really big documents to your clients instantaneously

Watch your iPhone pictures on your connected TV, without sync

Put your laptop in a swimming pool and keep your data safe

Share a folder with colleagues, so everyone always get the last version of documents

Extend the size of your iPad to put more movies into it

Get back old versions of your thesis after a wrong save.

Undelete files on your computers

Send e-mails with attachments of infinite size

…and so many things more!

Our job with Lima is to simplify your life, whenever there are files to play with. We want it transparent, so you don’t even have to think about it. There are a lot of good things in that.

What do I get?

Your Lima will come with a power supply and a cable to keep it connected to Internet. We’ll also include simple instructions on how to set it up.

Technical specifications

Embedded Linux (OpenWRT based)

x86 compatible processor

Port for you hard drive: USB2

Port for Internet: Ethernet port 10/100 Mbps

Average transfer speed: 30 Mbps

Supported file systems: NTFS, HFS+, Ext3/Ext4, FAT32

Number of drives supported (using an external USB hub): 8

Dimensions: 70mm (W) x 33mm (D) x 25mm (H)

Weight: 200g

LED Display: Power/ Action

Operation Environment: 0 – 95 °F

Storage Environment: 0 – 120°F

US or EU power adapter 110V/220V (included)

Ethernet cable (included)

To reduce manufacturing risks, the Lima device hardware is based on the Wanser-R, a commodity device produced by MRT Communications. We've partnered with MRT to change some components of the Wanser-R, so it meets Lima's performance requirements. The firmware, which gives its main functions to the device, is fully reprogrammed.

The Lima apps

Lima interacts with your devices through free Desktop and Mobile apps. These apps are the essence of Lima: they are the ones that make everything transparent and intuitive to use.

After getting your Lima, you’ll be able to install our apps on your iPhone, your iPad, your Android phone or tablet and your computers – either Mac, Linux or PC. We’re planning to support Windows Phone as soon as possible after launch.

We have a passion for simplifying the life of non-geek people, and we made sure that installation is as easy as it can get. We also built it so you can stop the installation or the use of Lima anytime, without doing any harm to your data.

Desktop

We designed the Lima desktop app so it doesn’t get in the way. We are very attached to the idea of letting you use your computer just as you did before.

After installing the app, the documents that did not fit in your computer before will appear in it. They’ll have a special icon on them, telling you that you can only access them from your Home or if you have Internet. You can sort them as you wish.

At anytime, the Lima app will enable you to play with files and folders directly from your OS, so you can:

Send files easily

Synchronize any folder with your contacts

Decide which files or folders should be “online-only” and which ones should be available offline

and Browse old versions of your documents

On Windows and Linux, you’ll have to right click on your files to begin. On Mac, you’ll have to drop them on the Lima icon. It’s your computer, but smarter.

Mobile

On your smartphone and your tablet, the Lima app will enable you to browse all of your files from everywhere. You’ll be able to display all of your pictures and videos, to open documents, and to listen to your entire music library. Everything will be there.

That's super practical to review or share your files on the go. As all of your devices work together, the pictures and videos you’ll take with your phone or your tablet will also appear in your computers right away.

The Tech

The main force of Lima... is you don't even realize it's there. To make it so, we had to adapt and develop a set of new technologies to make all your devices work together without even letting you notice it.

With Lima, all your devices are connected with each other thanks to a zero-configuration, private and encrypted VPN (asymmetric encryption based on RSA-2048/SHA-1 keys). We had excellent speed benchmarks on this network. It goes through any main NAT & firewall we tested, it's decentralized when possible, and it doesn't require any user configuration. It's safe and does the job.

When Lima is installed on your computer, our application intercepts all the input/output operations performed on your files, using several patent pending technologies. When Mac OS X, Windows or Linux want to store or access data, they ask our application instead of manipulating the hard drive. When needed these operations are redirected to Lima. Thanks to this, we give you the best experience possible. We show in your OS all the files you have in your Lima, even if they're not actually in your computer. We use your local storage memory as a cache, to store both the files recently used and the ones you want to keep for offline-viewing.

The Lima device itself is a small Linux-powered dongle. It's made to be kept always on, while drawing little power. Its job is to download and upload your files in the background when you need it, to secure the communications and to attract all the content that you create on your devices so it can be backed up on your hard drives.

You can connect any USB2 compatible drive to the device, and even use a USB hub if you want to connect several drives. Your drives are put in hibernation when possible. Under the hood, the average transfer speed for your data will be around 30Mb/s. This is not super-lightning fast, but it's sufficient for the usage of Lima. In fact, our cache policy reduces a lot the actual need to access your hard-drives. Your storage is as asynchronous as possible.

Our vision

« We’ve been talking a lot about the post-PC era. But our devices are still not a real replacement of our old desktop computers. Each one is independant, with its own memory. So none of them truely reflect us.

Lima brings the kind of unity that can make or devices really work together. It opens an era where we can think of all our devices as a single group ; where playing with two devices from two different manufacturers can really make us live a single and continuous experience.

Developers can now focus on the user instead of focusing on the devices they are using. Because now, our devices share something truely important for the post-PC era : a context. »

Severin MARCOMBES – CEO of CGC

Where we’re at

We’ve been working on Lima for over 2 years now. The hardware device you’ve seen on the video is ready for production. It will be manufactured by one of our partners in Shenzen. On the software side, we are in the process of transforming our prototype code into production code. It means running extensive tests on our software, and finishing up our user interface to make sure Lima is stable, beautiful and easy to use.

We estimate everything to be ready in six months, which should match the time when we receive our first devices from China.

To ship Lima into homes worldwide, the last required step for us is to be able to order a minimum of 1,000 devices. We can only do it with your contribution.

Thanks for your support!

Risks and challenges

There is always a risk when producing a product that combines both electronic hardware and software. So we made everything to reduce it to a minimum before launching this Kickstarter campaign.

The hardware used by the current version of Lima is a proven, tested hardware. Our manufacturer has already produced thousands of units successfully for other clients. The main risks concerning hardware are thus reduced to logistics. Unplanned delays in the manufacturing process can still occur, but problems related to the hardware design of the device are very unlikely.

On the software side, we’re glad to say that we overcomed the most critical technical challenges brought by our app. After 2 years of research and development, we have already built a prototype of our application on Mac, Windows and Linux. We are currently in the process of optimizing our application code to transform it into production-grade software. And we are confident we can do it during the next six months.

Support

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VERY EARLY BIRD: You get a Plug device, in Blue color. And you get it at a very special price. This device won't be manufactured ever again after this campaign. It's a proof you're one of our earliest supporters. (Please add $10 for shipping)